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Experienced or educated ? an everyday approach Formal education vs.

life experience

There are numerous examples in literature of characters with a simple but swift intelligence, who are conquering the reader by the power of their beautiful and sometimes brilliant mind. We can talk about .. or about . Which .etc. Romanian literature has also a particular case. A brilliant peasant, poorly schooled, but with a sharp and deductive mind. Romanians know him by the name of Moromete, and this name sometimes is also used to entail the essence of what is popular called native intelligence. He is simply smart, everybody will say. Hence the jumping into conclusions. You dont need school to be smart as well as you dont need diplomas to certify that you can perform some job here and there. For the sake of the article, lets focus a little on this example. The author of the Morometii - a Romanian saga about the life before, during, and after World War 2 of a normal peasant family wants to emphasize the natural born genius of the simple, sometimes ignored, peasant. He is trying to say: with or without a formal education, this mind, can apprehend and comprehend the whole world and the small world of everyday life, and also, can try to make a sense out of the soreness of living in poor conditions. This is what actually is the most important in the two volumes of this beautiful saga: a mans quest for trying to find out why things happened to him the way they did, and how are things happening indeed in this short and too often crude life. It is the quintessence of someone who is trying to find a way through this tortuous life. But what is sometimes overlooked, can be of utmost importance. Even this simple and apparently uneducated man, still reads the daily newspaper, and comments about the world and nations events with his friends. They even debate about some news, about how these wouldve looked if they happened in a smaller scale, like their village. The act of reading in itself, implicates that the reader learned the process, and was even a pupil a long time ago. In this way, there is not just one source for his brilliantness. He is not just clever, he is also comprehensive. I am wondering: how would all this have looked if this man was illiterate? In the same time, history is abundant with people that were properly and formally educated, but have ignored many of the lessons that they needed to understand from life itself. The iron fist of the Bolshevic Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, he himself an intellectual with a very sharp thinking, had come to transform the world into a living nightmare for over 2 billion people. For over 75 years Lenin and the system that he

elaborated, entrapped behind the iron curtain not just persons, but in the same time dreams, opportunities, hopes and solutions. In the more recent years, the leader of the khmer rouges (red khmers) from Cambodia , Pol Pot, a graduate of EFREI (Ecole Francaise dElectronique et dInformatique French University of Electronics and Informatics). In less than 3 years, his policies caused the death of over 3 million of his own people.

Life experience It happens that very often I hear people saying: He/She didnt study too much, has no degree in a specific area, but look, he/she is experienced. Life taught him that, and he managed to get himself known, to become someone, to achieve glory, fame and fortune, etc. Lifes harshness, the media, the lack of some real models to follow, the lack of an excellence race, seem to choke our dreams and to triumph all those that claim that life experience is a better choice then formal education. Not to mention the serious deficiencies of the national education system (from the grammar school up to postdoctoral graduate level), which are a solid rock in the hands of those who want to hit in the importance of formal education. It seems that at the end of the day, what its really important is to overcome everything and everyone that may prevent you from achieving what you like and hope for in this life, isnt it true? But is it? Still, opposite to what life experience might mean to some people, or even opposite to what is usually perceived as being life experience, this phrase means a lot more that what it is usually meant by it. Life experience is more than simply a trick, through which, individuals more or less educated, are achieving positions, fortune, or fame in the contemporary world. It is certainly more than the mere acquired instinct that helps us survive (please read to get around instead of survive ) in the urban jungle we sometimes live in, which is governed by the common saying: survival of the fittest. And it is more than the opposite of formal education. Unfortunatelly the way life experience is perceived by many individuals, at least in Romania, is strongly related to its recent history. Comunist devaluation of formal education Both communism and its malignant propaganda had influenced the general opinion of what is now understand by formal education.

Two great errors had come in this period through the above mentioned ways. It is well documented the aversion that communists had against the intellectuals. This was happening despite the need for economic and technological advance, which wouldve been impossible to attain if it where to base this only on farmers, peasants and workers. And despite the need for progress, in a paradoxically manner, only a few had access to superior education (i.e. education at a university level graduate, undergraduate, doctoral studies, etc.). The amount of places in universities was strictly controlled by the state and the party. Admission was an exam of a lifetime how students very often called it. You had few choices at that time. Either you were accepted through a difficult process in a state university, or you were rapidly incorporated in the mandatory military service, or even worse, you were condemned to endure a lifetime of chronic absence of everyday products (which was largely present everywhere in the communist world). The second great fault committed by communist ideological system was to make a joke out of the educated individual. Very often, through propaganda exhibited at all levels, these individual were mocked and made to look like something Conformity was the most common word the ideology wanted to implant in every individuals brain. And for the most fair and just system in the whole world at least that was what the communists pertain about their ideology it was for easier to lower the general standards, than to try to teach an entire population how to lift themselves up to higher moral, social and living standards. This were the two main pathways through which much of the prestige conferred by education and profession was lost. School and life have much more in common /School and life have a lot in common Reality shows us that the separation of the two is arbitrary and purely didactic. Separation between formal education and the "school of life"(ones accumulated life experience) is made to delineate more precisely the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of each. But when we challenge them deeply, we see that the essence of both terms is common: education. And it is right to say that both forms change the individual and shape him. Giving not only simple access to information, but rather facillitating the interpretation of it both facilitate the application of methods and principles that will determine successful behaviors. School can be imagined, and even personified as a master, as the master of the ancient philosophy, a teacher that takes you to the library and teaches you how to learn, how to choose the right books and how to prioritize everything in order to have a successful pursuit. Then also helps you to get the tools that can assay a better understand of the world around you, perhaps even an objective perspective of life.

Imagine for a second how would the world be like without electricity, without telephones or without transport? All of these are the result of the work of people who considered formal education important so that it can provide the means to overall progress. In the same manner, life shows that we cant operate strictly with pure concepts but that we often find ourselves in the situation where we need to have a re-interpretation and a re-settlement of theory that was already built. In other words, education brings out only the best of you. That is why formal education and life experience are but two sides of the same coin.They should not be designed separately. They are very useful to the one who wants to know how to use them. And because ultimately all of the above are an exercise of ones will. It is not what you know that helps you the most, but just what you want to know is what gets you changed.

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